Twisted Pine brings new album to Passim Aug. 11

Tuesday

Aug 1, 2017 at 4:00 PMAug 1, 2017 at 4:00 PM

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

With the release of their self-titled debut album on Signature Sounds last month, the Boston-based bluegrass quartet Twisted Pine can now be heard at home and in your car, not just in the numerous clubs they’ve been performing at over the past few years.

But that won’t stop them from playing out. They’ll have a CD release show at Club Passim in Cambridge on Aug. 11 (and yes, it’ll be on sale there).

There have been a couple of personnel changes since they formed in 2013, but the current lineup of Rachel Sumner (guitar, vocals), Kathleen Parks (fiddle, vocals), Dan Bui (mandolin) and Chris Sartori (bass) have been together since Sartori joined two years ago, and they’re the lineup on “Twisted Pine,” a collection of 11 original songs.

“By July of last year, we were still doing a lot of bluegrass covers, many of them by Bill Monroe,” said Sumner from her home in Somerville. “That was really fun, but Kathleen and I had been writing songs outside of the band for quite some time, and we wanted to start using them with the group. When we realized we had enough originals for an album, we started demoing them. We already had a relationship with [the label] Signature Sounds, who have been kind of developing us. I think they were waiting for us to show them we were ready. The point suddenly came where we all felt that it clicked. We thought, ‘Wow! We’re a band! We’re playing original music!’ And then we had an album.”

Sumner actually came to bluegrass through a roundabout route. She was playing flute, and sticking with the classical repertoire. It wasn’t till her second year at Berklee College of Music, where Parks and Bui were also studying, that she picked up a guitar.

“I was already interested in acoustic music, and was listening to Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers, but I was still playing flute,” she said. “Then one of my friends said he really wanted to practice soloing on his mandolin, and asked if I would learn three chords on guitar so he could do that. He ended up teaching me three chords, I played them over and over, and he got to practice his soloing.”

And she took to it, eventually meeting up with the other musicians who would become Twisted Pine.

“I had to work pretty hard to play at the neck-breaking speeds to be able to play traditional bluegrass,” she said. “I learned really quickly, on the go.”

The original version of the band was getting work at weddings, then landed some gigs and a residency at the Cantab in Cambridge, which is where Sartori – a former UMass Amherst student – first saw them at a bluegrass jam.

“The residency in 2013 is what kind of solidified us as a band,” said Sumner. “We just kept learning more songs, and Chris joined in July of 2015.”

For the record, Sumner claims credit for the band’s name.

“Well, Wikipedia kind of helped,” she said. “We kept scrolling through it, and I kept coming up with punk-sounding names, and at one point I thought we should relegate it to trees.”

Twisted Pine has done most of their shows in the Northeast, but they’ve toured as far west as Colorado and as far east as Scotland.

“In January, 2015, we played at Celtic Connections, which is a winter music festival in Glasgow,” she said, then explained what a success that appearance was. “It’s pretty unnatural for a band like ours to be seen live over there, and they’re kind of starved for this music. So when we went, everyone was really excited.”

The band is just as excited to be returning to Club Passim, where they first performed in 2014, though Sumner had her own debut there, on flute, a couple of years earlier as part of a Berklee ensemble recital.

“We have all of the new album practiced, so we’ll be playing that,” she said. “But we’ll be doing other stuff, as well. We’ll play some traditional bluegrass tunes, and we’ve been working on some brand-new songs, which will most definitely make an appearance there.”

Asked if they’re still doing their rather special cover of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” she laughed and said, “We thought about doing that song a couple of years ago, and we laughed about it. Then we realized that Kathleen’s voice is really high and kind of sounds like Debbie Harry. We thought, ‘Maybe she should sing it,’ then one day we all said, ‘Let’s just do it!’ So we’ll probably be doing it that night.”